A daily dose of unique art, culture and technology from around the world.

On Monday British amateur photographer Martin Le-May heard a commotion while walking in an East London park and stumbled upon an extraordinary sight–a European green woodpecker flying with a small weasel clinging to its back. Le-May had a camera with him and was able to capture several incredible shots of the event. As Le-May explained to ITV News, the weasel was taken for a ride after it ambushed the bird on the ground. The bird took flight–with the weasel on its back–in an effort to escape. After a short flight it landed, and was able to shake off the weasel before taking flight once more. Le-May’s clearest photo of the encounter has since become a viral sensation online, with a number of “remixes” cropping up today. Photoshop conspiracists take note: While Le-May’s images do seem highly improbable, a BBC wildlife expert told BBC News that such a scenario “is not totally unheard of.”

As we walked we heard a distressed squawking and I saw that flash of green. So hurriedly I pointed out to Ann the bird and it settled into the grass behind a couple of small silver birch trees. Both of us trained our binoculars and it occurred that the woodpecker was unnaturally hopping about like it was treading on a hot surface. Lots of wing flapping showing that gloriously yellow/white colour interspersed with the flash of red head feathers. Just after I switched from my binoculars to my camera the bird flew across us and slightly in our direction; suddenly it was obvious it had a small mammal on its back and this was a struggle for life.

A persistent little tuxedo kitten frantically attacks a load of laundry that’s spinning around in a front-load washing machine, pausing each time the washer changes direction. According to tommo0906, his kitten is “being a dumbass!” Or maybe just adorable.

A recent episode of the American Chemical Society series Reactions explains the chemistry that turns blue jeans blue. The episode gives a brief explanation of the history of jeans and the indigo dye used to color them. That process is more complicated than just soaking the clothes in dye, and requires the use of an alkali solution and oxidation to give the jeans their signature color.

According to a new hypothesis, it turns out that in the process of domesticating dogs, we might have actually been affecting some of their stem cells.In a dog embryo, there’s a group of stem cells called the neural crest. And these cells are responsible for forming a specific set of physical features–like the dog’s coat, and the structure of its face, and its adrenal glands. The earliest dogs may have been less aggressive because they had smaller adrenal glands. So when early humans bred for tameness, the dogs probably also ended up with changes to other traits that are controlled by the neural crest–like floppy ears, and the faces with more juvenile features, such as smaller jaws. So basically, by domesticating dogs, we may have ended up selecting for mutations in their stem cells that made them less like wolves and more like the animal that’s probably sleeping in your living room right now.

In his eye-popping photo series Yiwu Commodity City, photographer Richard John Seymour captures the overwhelming abundance of consumer goods found at China Commodity City, a sprawling complex in Yiwu, China that is the world’s largest small commodities market. The 43-million-square-foot market is full of cramped booths occupied by wholesalers of toys, artificial flowers, apparel, and all manner of Chinese-produced goods. There are an astonishing 62,000 booths at the market.